Overcoming anorexia

Bendigo resident Lisa has been living with the eating disorder anorexia from around 2003, and has decided to tell her story to help demystify the disease.

She takes us back to how she used to be.

"I was a 'restricter' and over-exercised as well...I really restricted what I ate."

Lisa says her food for the day would be "a bit of fruit" for breakfast and lunch, and she would also exercise for an hour morning and night.

"It started off with depression."

"I was in a really bad space to the extent that I actually wanted to drive my car into a tree, mainly just to hurt myself, so someone would care about me, because I didn't feel like I had that [care]."

"So instead, I controlled my life by restricting what I ate."

Lisa says she's lucky because her employer at the time recognised something was wrong and she was able to get her some psychiatry support through the work system, even though at the time she didn't think she was ill.

The psychiatrist told her she had anorexia and depression, but at that point her treatment didn't go much further than that.

Lisa says other doctors and dieticians simply told her to eat a bit more and put a bit more butter on her toast, which she says is advice that entirely misses the point of how to treat someone with an eating disorder, and doesn't work.

She finally got proper care from a local doctor when she went for a medical assessment for a job.

"He said, 'you're well enough for the job, but you are not well,' and he started a process of trying to find out more and find out what support he could give me, and that led to him telling me there's a space at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, because that has an Eating Disorders Unit."